Tissue products such as facial tissues, paper towels, bath tissues, napkins and other similar products, are designed to include several important properties. For example products should have good bulk, good absorbency, a soft feel, and should have good strength and durability. Unfortunately, when steps are taken to increase one property of the product, the other characteristics of the product are often adversely affected.
Formulators have for years attempted, to balance the level of softwood fibers in their paper structures so ensure adequate strength of their structures while at the same time trying to minimize the negative impacts from higher levels of softwood fibers.
One example of the problem is demonstrated by the efforts that formulators of paper toweling products have been putting forth, working to develop new products that have higher in-use wet strength while maintaining or reducing dry strength. However, as formulators use typical paper-making machine process variables to increase product in-use wet strength, other consumer desired attributes, such as absorbency and/or softness typically decreases. The problem formulators struggle with for improving paper toweling is, how to increase towel in use wet strength while maintaining or improving softness and/or absorbency and/or decrease softwood inclusion while maintaining or reducing total product dry strength and increasing sheet flexibility. All of the normal paper-making machine process variables available to a papermaker for increasing strength normally can negatively affect the sheet feel and can negatively impact product absorbency.
Accordingly there continues to be a need for new fibrous paper structures that further optimize the physical product performance of towel products that increase wet strength without sacrificing softness, absorbency and paper making reliability. Specifically, there is a need for new fibrous paper structures that increase wet strength while maintaining or increasing dry strength. Such structures are especially valuable for multi-density paper making structures with non-limiting examples of such structures being manufactured on Through-Air Dried, fabric Crepe, NTT, ATMOS and UCTAD machine processes.